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A theatre critic's view on cellphones in the audience

Not everyone is put off by the prospect of smartphones mixing with live performance.

By Carly MagaSpecial to the Star

Sun., Sept. 27, 2015

When I took my seat about 20 minutes before an opening night curtain at the Stratford Festival in July, the mid-size Tom Patterson Theatre was still generally empty. An usher soon afterwards led a man up the aisle next to me, within earshot.

“And just a reminder to turn off your cellphone,” I heard the usher say before she turned to return to her post.

“Oh, I’m a critic,” the man responded. “I’d kill myself if that happened.”

At the time, the Internet was still obsessing over “The Patti LuPone Incident,” when she, now famously, grabbed an audience member’s phone as they were texting during LuPone’s performance. Around the same time, a young theatregoer became a social media joke when he tried to charge his phone on the Broadway set of Hand to God. Most recently, Benedict Cumberbatch pleaded with audience members not to record or photograph him as Hamlet in London.

Though the man at Stratford came off as flippant, if a bit morose, he obviously wasn’t totally against the supposedly new argument that theatre audiences are more boorish and inattentive than ever, and cellphones are the latest scourge destined to destroy the art form. Though technically, actors have given public shamings over ringing cellphones since at least the late 1990s.

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But not everyone is so put off by the prospect of smartphones mixing with live performance. Actor Colin Doyle’s latest showMonday Nights, cocreated by Doyle and four other actors, usually got a laugh from the audience when they were asked to “Please turn their cellphones . . . on,” to photograph, text and tweet throughout the interactive basketball-themed performance.

“We were not 100 per cent sure if it would work, then it went gangbusters,” Doyle said about their social media strategy, suggested by their producer as an alternative to traditional marketing materials like posters and ads. “Certainly I couldn’t imagine now doing the show without it.”

Posts and messages from Monday Nights audience members ended up providing an in-depth archive of the show’s run, bringing in repeat ticket buyers, and even got the attention of MLSE and NBA Canada. When Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany tweeted from the play, one of her Spanish fans on vacation in New York City redirected her route home through Toronto so she could catch the show. “She scored her first basket in her life at the show,” Doyle said.

For safety reasons, Monday Nights patrons were asked not to use flash, and to be aware of potentially rogue basketballs while looking at their phones. Otherwise, Doyle noticed that most tended to police their own phone use strictly, with most people only using them at the beginning and end of the show.

Doyle admits he has trouble managing his own personal relationship with his phone, but he now thinks there can be a place for phones in the theatre. “Where are the places where you can’t have a phone now, hospitals and theatres?” he said.

Aislinn Rose, general manager of the Theatre Centre and artistic producer of Praxis Theatre, has been experimenting with phone interactivity in theatre for years, including Tweet Seats in some of her shows and fully integrating a Twitter feed or interactive text messaging in others.

“Someone tweeted, ‘This thing just happened onstage, and it made me feel really alone.’ It was great to be able to respond directly to her ‘Well, I’m here also feeling the same thing,’” Rose said. To her, ringing phones and other annoyances wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t customary for the theatre audiences to be so quiet and invisible to each other and to the actors.

“If audiences were these rowdy bunches of people answering back, the way that it used to be, the candy wrapper next to you, you don’t even hear it. And this brings us to the larger question of how should an audience be?” she said. “I think if we’re trying to make audiences behave so well that you never notice them beside you, I think we’re going to lose out to Netflix.”

For me, a dark theatre can still be a much-appreciated refuge from the noise of social media, texts and emails. But surely there’s more to it than what Sarah Stanley described in her piece Audiences are Assholes as “a place of gathering to share rules together”? Many people have not figured out how to have a healthy, well-balanced relationship with technology yet — the theatre world included. In an industry based on the idea that empathizing with another person or character is good for the soul, let’s dial back our reactions to a ringing cellphone.

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